DSLR’s Are Just To Big and Heavy

Over the past 3 or 4 years the amount of photos I have in my portfolio has grown at a fantastic rate, with all the weddings and portrait sessions I’ve been lucky enough to have shot, and yet the number of images I have shot of my own kids and family has dwindled alarmingly.

Through that time I’ve been slowly building my camera gear by adding quality lens’ and upgrading the camera bodies, and although I’m over the moon with the quality of the images my set up can produce, the sheer bulk of it all just makes it all cumbersome to handle away from working situations. Basically my DSLR’s are just to big and heavy to carry around on leisure days.

Even the smaller of my two cameras, with the relatively small 50mm lens on, is still to big to be taking on days out with the kids. It’s not pocket-able, not by a long shot, and even if the wife’s handbag was big, there wouldn’t be a spare 10 inches in it to fit it in. So having it in your hand all day is to much and not being able to put it away without having to have a fairly big case/bag isn’t ideal.

So days out to the likes of Chessington or the coast, or like today to Tulleys Farm Family Christmas, would normally go unrecorded. I realise our phones have cameras, and some even have quite good ones, but my phone camera has suffered from the abuse the phone has taken from the high use it gets, and that high use tends to drain the battery faster then I’d like, so I rarely get my phone out to take images, and the images I do get just appear clouded and foggy due to lens being heavily scratched and scuffed.

Today I’ve gone ahead and taken steps to solve that problem and bought myself a reasonably decent point and shoot camera, the Nikon S9900. Whilst it may not offer the same kind of quality my DSLR’s will, I just want it to be able to capture simple carefree images of my kids in good quality.

What it does offer is pretty much the same sort of controls that I am used to with my DSLR’s, where I mainly shoot in manual, and so I can shoot in full manual with this little compact to. Having said that it’s little and compact, and yes it will fit nicely in my pocket, its actually really sturdily built and quite heavy in the hand for its size, which makes it feel more substantial that it appears, which I really like.

It’s button layout and menu system seems to be well placed, easy to navigate and understand and some the features it has will see me using this camera away from family life as well.

One of those features are GPS, where I can now take a camera with me on some of the off road mountain bike rides I go on, so there will now be no doubt as to where I was when I took a photograph. Another feature is it’s connect-ability to my phone or iPad via NFC or Wifi, so on weddings I might just grab a quick shot with it through ceremony or any other part of the day, as it looks far more worthy of use at a wedding than using a phone would, and then post a status update or two on Facebook later in the day via my phone when I get my break whilst the wedding party sit down for food.

It will definitely get a lot of use, and finally I’ll start to grab more memorable shots of my kids growing, having fun, enjoying family life, and I might just get a little bit of the hobby side of photography back in my life, something that has become lost to me over the past few years.

The images shown in the post, apart from that of the camera, were all taken with the S9900 on todays family trip out, and yeah whilst they won’t win any quality awards they will definitely serve as awesome memories of our young family growing up.